Conversion And Recognition:Swedish Baptist Mission And Local Society In Shandong

Influenced by the world missionary movement and China Inland Mission, Missionary Societies from Sweden dispatched missions to China during the late19th and early20th century. One of the them was Swedish Baptist Mission whose missionary field was mainly concentrated in the Jiaozhou-Gaomi-Zhucheng area where was the boundary of Qi Culture and Lu Culture. Over the period of sixty years, it eventually became the most influential western missionary society in the Jiaozhou-Gaomi-Zhucheng area.The development process of Swedish Baptist Mission always presented the trend of indigenization. In order to survive and sermon, missionaries worked hard at Chinese and Chinese culture. In fact, when they preached in the local dialect, they automatically promoted the process of indigenization. But the missionaries’ identification as strangers which cannot been changed, had become the direct restriction to communicate with the Chinese. To meet the needs of the developing missionary work, Chinese preachers who were the majority of the servicers in church were playing more and more important role in the church, because there were no communication barriers between them and believers. The church’s indigenous features seemed to be more obvious with the participation of Chinese preachers. However, due to the small size of Swedish Baptist Mission, the missionaries could manage the church without the help of Chinese preachers, so the church only had two Chinese priests. It can be said that missionaries were the leaders and decision-makers, while Chinese preachers were simply major participants in the missionary work.As a kind of local social organization, whose indigenization was also influenced by local social factors. And the local authority played an important role in this process. Viewed form the connection between Swedish-Chinese Middle School and the local authority, the control of the Nanjing National Government over Christian schools was mostly manifested in some delicate and subtle files, which provided the possibility for Christian school to win a larger living space. Therefore, registration only indicated fractional adjustment of Christian schools’education policy instead of the complete change of education aim. That is to say, the purpose of Swed ish-Chinese Middle School’s registration was not to slave to the government, but to achieve compromise with political environment for the sake of their survival and development. In conclusion, confronted with the influence of political environment on the survival and development of Christian school, Swedish-Chinese Middle School held its own ground and meanwhile took corresponding actions so as to seek balance between religion and politics, which became a part of indigenization process of Swedish Baptist Mission.Over the sixty years period, Swedish Baptist Mission has experienced plenty of wars. For missionaries, different identity in wars made considerable differences in mind and social circumstances. Missionaries’ situation in the war continually changed their identities, which made them wander between strangers and fraternity. However, the transformation from strangers to fraternity was the main development path of the missionaries’ identities in China, which was also a part of the process of indigenization.It is worth noting that there was no direct link between the church’s development degree and the indigenization. Indigenization is a kind of natural selection and the natural reaction to the local society and culture in the development of the church. Swedish Baptist Mission has showed plenty of characteristics of localization when connected with local society. However, indigenization has not reached the ideal level because of the limitation of various factors. In fact, Swedish Baptist Mission was a local church with distinctive local characteristics because of the combination of Chinese and western cultural, which was different from western mission or pure native church.